Until now.

The Dockstar Alternative Replacement

Let us introduce you to Mail Perspectives, which is a component of a quartet of small Mac mail add-on programs bundled into an offering called MailSuite, and offered by Small Cubed.

In total, MailSuite is made up of Dockstar alternative Mail Perspectives (more on that below), MailTags (allows you to tag and organize your email by “keywords, projects, importance, color, due dates and more”), SigPro (signature management), and Mail Act-On (mail processing rules).

Now, Mail Perspectives is in fact much more than a Dockstar replacement – in fact, in the description of Mail Perspectives, Small Cubed doesn’t even mention the badges on the dock icon. Says Small Cubed of Mail Perspective:

“Whether you want to see the latest message or the recent message list, Mail Perspective’s compact window design means your email can always be visually available, but never the focus of your attention until you need it.

Navigating Mail’s windows can be a handful when you want to open different viewers, mailboxes (sic) to find messages. With Mail Perspectives you can set up multi-paned windows. Expand the space when you need it and hide all windows with a keystroke. It’s like coming home to tranquility after a busy afternoon of running errands.”

But it is the previously unsung enhanced Mail dock icon about whose praises we are now singing.

Mac Mail Dock Icon with Mail Perspectives

Above is a sample of the Mail dock icon when set up with Mail Perspectives. Note that you can not only assign different shapes to each badge (and Mail Perspectives offers more shapes than did Dockstar), and different colors, but you can even give each one its own size (which is how we made the traditional inbox red circle larger than the others).

How to Set Up Mail Dock Notification Icons with Mail Perspectives

First, go here and download MailSuite.

After you have installed MailSuite and enabled Mail Perspectives, go to your Mail program, hover over the folder for which you want a notification on your dock icon, and ‘control-click’ it. You will notice that you now have a new option, Open in New Perspective Window.

Open in New Perspective Window

This will open a separate compact viewer of the contents of that folder, which in and of itself is cool, and useful, but not what this article is about. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like – note where we point to the name of the folder (and if you’re wondering how we got those cool graphics in the folder name, see our article You Can’t Change the Color of Mailbox Folders in Mac Mail but You CAN Add Emoji as Icons to the Mailbox Names!).

Now, here is the secret to getting those dock icons.

Control-click on the folder name.

And then click on ‘Edit’.

This will bring up the Mail Perspectives editing window for that folder, from which you can assign a dock icon.

Once you click on one of the available positions, it will bring up the dock icon editing window, from which you can select the shape, color, and size of the badge you want to assign for email in that folder.

Once you are happy with the icon, you can drag it to whatever position you want it to occupy on your Mail icon in your dock.

Oh, one last thing – once you have your badges on your dock icon, you can also edit their settings from the Mail Perspectives settings pane in Mail preferences. But what you can’t do from the settings in Mal preferences is assign badges to a folder! In the Mail Perspectives settings within Mail preferences you can only assign badges to account inboxes. In order to create a badge for a mail folder that is not an inbox, you have to do it the way that we outline above.

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